Handwriting Is on the Wall

Penmanship skills are being slowly erased in a typing and texting age

Some years ago I spent a few weeks in the hills outside Rome with some priestly scholars who were engaged in producing the definitive Latin edition of the complete works of Thomas Aquinas. The job of checking hundreds of medieval manuscripts, looking for errors that had crept in over the centuries, was tough and exacting. At one point I asked whether any original manuscripts by Aquinas himself had survived -- and if they had, did that make the...